Playing out: A study into children's use of public space in 1970s housing estates

在英国，儿童肥胖和缺乏运动是一个日益严重的问题，对儿童的健康和经济都有影响。通过户外游戏增加儿童的活动有积极的影响，但对如何实现这一点还知之甚少。本研究旨在探讨对儿童自主活动和户外游戏有积极影响的环境因素。它采取了一种创新的方法来做到这一点，重新回顾了20世纪70年代的一个时期，当时儿童自由使用公共空间的能力被更广泛地概念化为对他们的发展至关重要。以20世纪70年代的两个社区议会庄园--泰恩河畔纽卡斯尔的拜克庄园和伦敦的亚历山德拉路庄园为例，考察了它们是如何设计来满足儿童感知到的需求的，然后调查了居住在那里的不同世代的儿童如何使用公共空间。这使得能够探索这些小区的属性和社会态度对儿童发挥能力的积极或负面影响的程度，以找出对今天的住宅区规划是否有借鉴意义。

Childhood obesity and inactivity is a growing problem in the UK with impacts on children's health andthe economy. Increasing children's activity through outdoor play has positive impacts but not enoughis known about how to achieve this. This research project aims to investigate the environmental factorswhich can positively influence children's independent mobility and outdoor play. It takes an innovativeapproach to doing this through re-visiting a period in the 1970s when children's ability to use publicspace freely was more widely conceptualised as being important in their development. Taking twopioneering 1970s council estates as case studies, Byker Estate in Newcastle upon Tyne and AlexandraRoad Estate in London, it examines how they were designed to meet the perceived needs of children.It then investigates how different generations of children living there have used public space. Thisenables an exploration of the extent to which attributes of these estates and social attitudes positivelyor negatively impact on children's ability to play out to find out whether there are lessons for theplanning of housing estates today.